Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that shortly before its open call at the world’s largest consumer technology show, ABC aired an episode of Shark Tank (Season 6, “Week 4”) that devolved into a debate over what a technology is. The company that prompted the debate, called Reviver, makes a fabric wipe that masks odors when rubbed on clothing. Company founders, brothers Ben and Eric Kusin, of Dallas, Texas, pitched the show dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of jeans and candy colored company t-shirts: in their case, light blue tees with their company name screen-printed across the front in lower case, white, sans serif letters. “I think you’ve got a good product,” entertainment mogul and Shark Tank judge Mark Cuban tells the brothers midway through the segment, “but first, you’re not a technology.” The soundtrack’s stock music swells, then turns ominous. The brothers counter that they’ve spent $150,000 on custom machinery; Cuban insists that machinery does not a technology make. “It’s not a technology!” he repeats as the shot closes in on Ben Kusin’s stunned expression. Dramatic twist achieved, ABC cuts to commercial.

Shark Tank plays by the reality TV rulebook: editors cut hour-long sessions into scenes lasting minutes, splice in reaction shots out of sequence, and post-zoom wide shots into close-up for dramatic effect. Ben Kusin’s slack-jawed stare, broadcast as his response to Cuban’s pronouncement, may well have come from a different moment in the shoot. Yet the tension cultivated by the TV show comes as much from the producers’ editing suite as from the judges’ ability to fast-track products and fund fledgling companies. In tech industry parlance, Shark Tank’s objective is monetization, not innovation; the argument between Cuban and the Kusins stems less from disagreement over the nature of a technology than over its association with market value. After the commercial break, Eric Kusin defends Reviver’s technological status based on its multiple applications. “We just started thinking of ourselves as a technology because the manufacturers are telling us what this can do,” he explains, and begins ticking potential features off on his fingers—but Cuban cuts him off immediately, at “mosquito repellent,” noting that talcum powder also has a lot of uses. To Cuban, it seems, technology means digital, or at least electronic, whereas to the Kusins, technology means machinic and scalable.

Despite their quarrel over the ontological status of odor masking wipes, however, Cuban and the Kusins alike define technology as a means of accruing venture capital. For the Kusins, both the uniqueness of their formula and its potential for further applications, which they see as technological properties, indicate the desirability of their product to prospective investors. Although Cuban rejects the Kusins’ assertion that the wipes are technological, he perceives the brothers’ insistence on calling themselves a tech company as a reuse for acquiring funding—from their father, founder of the video game corporation GameStop, from whom they received a two million dollar investment to start their venture. (“You only call it a technology because that allows you to go to dad and say, dear dad, we have a technology!”) Cuban may or may not be correct that the elder Mr. Kusin restricts his interest in his children to their interest in the tech sector, but entrepreneurial calculation undoubtedly led the brothers to adopt the language and aesthetics of Silicon Valley. Describing their “freshness revolution” while dressed in t-shirts that Reviver (which, like Twitter, Tumblr, and Uber follows a tech industry naming trend), the brothers emulate celebrated CEOs of the digital economy: usually, like the Kusins, young white men in jeans and t-shirts (Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick are exemplars), whose products promise to revolutionize something. Contra Cuban, it seems to me that the Kusins frame their product as a technology in the hopes that doing so will attract investors other than their father; they look like hundreds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs roaming the exhibition halls at CES.

Self-presentation is always part of pitching prospective funders. When the pitch is broadcast on national TV, performance plays an even larger role. Shark Tank contestants frequently dress according to a theme, and it’s easy to imagine introducing a similar product with entirely different stylistics. Another set of contestants, pitching a product that freshens clothing, might put on, say, aprons or athletic wear—especially if those contestants are women. Interestingly, the Kusin brothers avoid feminine associations with cleaning or clothing, distance bolstered by coding their product as a tool of technology rather than domesticity.

Partnership offers the Kusins receive from Shark Tank judges at the end of the segment underscore the domestic and technological duality of their product: one from Robert Herjavec, who made his fortune in the IT industry, and another from Lori Greiner, of the QVC home shopping network. That the brothers opt to partner with QVC, drawn in part to the exposure afforded by the TV network, suggests how the entrepreneurial aesthetics of digital technology transcend industrial sectors.

The Kusins’ dispute with Cuban gets no further attention. Their post-pitch interview, a confessional clip that Shark Tank usually devotes to rehashing contestants’ perceived slights at the hands of judges, focuses on Barbara Corcoran, founder of Corcoran real estate. Upon learning that their father has already given them two million dollars, Corcoran declines Reviver on the grounds that she doesn’t invest in rich kids. “We’re not rich!” Ben Kusin tells the camera after the segment, “That’s an unfair characterization of how they made it out to be, because of our father’s success.” Blindness to privilege isn’t restricted to Silicon Valley either.

This 1938 trade press article argues that choosing the announcer to voice the commercial is similar to choosing the correct typeface for a print ad.

As podcasters draw larger audiences, they are experimenting with business models, especially with advertising.

Like many media historians, I’ve been struck by the parallels between 1920s-30s radio and 2010s podcasting. Despite obvious differences between podcasting and early radio—such as asynchronous reception, niche rather than mass audiences, global rather than local distribution—podcasters hoping to support themselves by advertising share many of the opportunities and difficulties faced by the producers of Jack Benny and Kraft Music Hall.

When radio emerged in the 1920s, its boosters promised it would be an effective advertising medium because, instead of inert printed text, it used the human voice, which “tug[s] at heartstrings,” according to Radio Showmanship, and “affects the heart, mind, and soul,” according to a 1929 CBS pamphlet. Podcaster Alix Spiegel (Invisibilia) has recently made a similar claim about the emotional information carried in voices.

Early radio advertising proponents noted that audiences experienced radio as individuals rather than as masses, in the intimacy and privacy of the home, making it feel like a more confidential and personalized medium than, say, films in theaters. Likewise, some podcasters today note the high “engagement” they enjoy with their audiences, many of whom, listening on headphones or earbuds, are far more attentive than audiences for whom radio or television is sonic wallpaper. Advertisers who fear television audiences have strayed to other screens may find podcast audiences more appealing. As one podcaster explains, “People really pay attention to the ads,” so advertisers may pay very high prices (CPMs) to reach them.

The cartoonist H. T. Webster poked fun at announcers perfecting their commercial delivery.

Early radio proponents, such as a NBC time salesman, noted radio’s “pseudo-friendship” effect, when audiences’ parasocial relationships with radio personalities spilled over into their perceptions of whichever products those personalities endorsed. Likewise, some podcasters today, such as Mark Maron and the hosts of Men in Blazers, are asked by advertisers to promote products by integrating endorsements or uses of products into their podcasts, allowing brands to leverage the audience’s good will toward the host. Such “testimonials,” an established strategy in print advertising before the radio era, also had a long history in radio and television, as hosts such as Mary Margaret McBride and Arthur Godfrey integrated product endorsements into their talk shows.

However, advertisers do run some risks when closely tying the commercial message to the host or announcer’s personality. In early radio, some suggested that announcers delivering advertising messages must sound “sincere” or risk losing audience trust. The commercial’s words, according to Norman Brokenshire, a well-known announcer, must be “felt as well as spoken.” Likewise, StartUp podcaster Alex Blumberg, who uses first-person narratives and interviews in both his program and advertising, has insisted that he selects his advertisers carefully so that any implied endorsement by him is sincere and authentic.

In the 1930s the ad agency J. Walter Thompson would sometimes, instead of professional announcers, have an amateur or “man on the street” speak the commercial message; this, the ad agents believed, could make the advertising sound “more sincere, frank, and open.” Likewise, podcaster Roman Mars (99% Invisible) often uses soundbites of his own child speaking about his advertisers, and the producers of Serial, most famously, use “man on the street” interviews for their commercial for MailChimp. The interviewee who notoriously mispronounced the name as “Mail Kimp” reinforced the authenticity of the ad.

In 1920s radio, producers worried at first that audiences would turn off the radio if the program were interrupted by ads. Today audiences can easily avoid interruptive ads, and so podcasters feel a special need to keep them listening. Blumberg’s ads in StartUp, for example, resemble the rest of the show; as he interviews his documentary sources about his topic, so he interviews his sponsors about their business, with no change in style or tone. The similarity is so close, in fact, that he employs a special music cue so that listeners won’t confuse the ad with the program.

This integration of format or style between program and commercial was routine in 1930s-40s radio. Comedian Fred Allen made jokes with announcers about sponsors, and Jack Benny famously integrated humorous references to Jell-O into his comedy. The intention was not to confuse audiences but to smooth out any disjunctures and keep audiences listening.

Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media & the StartUp podcast (Image: The Wolf Den/Midroll Media)

Blumberg has already confronted one of the pitfalls of such integrations. For his company’s other program, Reply All, the producer used an interview with a young boy about his use of the web site provider Squarespace as an advertisement for that site. The boy, and his mother, thought the interview was for the program, not an ad, and the mother’s sense of offense was rapidly transmitted via social media. In a perfectly reflexive and reflective episode about this event, Blumberg interviewed the mother, who noted that her son, unlike a hired performer, was offered no compensation for his testimonial. So Blumberg’s production of authentic ads via documentary-style soundbites has to gain the trust not just of the audience but also of the documentary subjects.

In some ways, then, podcasting is where radio was in the late 1920s, promising to be a new medium but like old media simultaneously. Advertisers’ need to reach attentive audiences has increased as audiences have been unshackled from linear media’s schedules and forced exposure to advertising. As podcasters try to monetize programming, maintaining their audiences’ trust and attention will be crucial to their success, and that, in turn, will depend in part on how they handle their advertising.